Recommendations for Laptop Battery monitors and maintainance

[rodonn]

Any one got any recommendations for Battery Monitors?

Also, does anyone know of any battery conditioner utilities (Some laptops had them in the old days to prevent 'memory' problems for laptops that were top up charged all the time... it's less of a problem with Li-Ion but it does happen)?

[TerryP]

the battery monitor that comes with the systems always been good enough for me although I usually look at the sysctl's instead. There should be several in ports but if they work on your system, is probably dependent upon how they work and your laptops hardware.


When I feel a need to let the battery discharge some juice, I usually cut the A/C until I hit around 3-5% charge. Beyond that, I wouldn't know wha tyou mean by 'conditioning'.

[rodonn]

Beyond that, I wouldn't know wha tyou mean by 'conditioning'

That's because you're 12, junior :evil:

Full drain without causing the OS or file system to screw up

and the klaptop monitor tells me I have 0:03 hours (three minutes) when I have something like 2.5 to 3 hours (I get a hellishly good battery life out of the two almost 6 hours)

I'd like something that tells me the amount of time on battery... :)

[TerryP]

Actually when it comes to laptops, I'm more like 1 since that's how many years old my only laptop is :-P


My systems manual states that when the reported battery times are getting to far off the mark: to recalibrate it through the BIOS as incidated, how if at all that holds up for older laptops I can't say. In over a year I've gone as low as 2-3% and about 2.5hr but never had an 'oh shit' moment about power running out, even when the A/C cable fell out of the adapter...



Who in their right mind would write a battery monitor that does any thing but show time remaining?, Wait don't anwser that haha.

[rodonn]

The VAIO won't do that... Hell, it only supports 256Mb of RAM (although with PC-BSD it operates comparably well to my XP box, and my dual core Vista box)

There seems to upper limit on my HD however... the HD has gone from 6GB OEM to 60GB... :D

[Ben Hacker Jr]

So....

any suggestions on application to use for: "battery monitor" on Sony Vaio VGN-UX280p

http://esupport.sony.com/US/perl/swu-li ... e=Original (http://esupport.sony.com/US/perl/swu-list.pl?mdl=VGNUX280P&UpdateType=Original)

The only mention of "battery" in the guide is:
cpufreq - cpufreq is a background process (daemon) to adjust CPU speed and voltage on the fly. This is a nice way to save battery power, because the lower the clock speed, the less power the CPU consumes. This is especially recommended for laptop users.

user@pcbsd% uname -a
FreeBSD pcbsd 7.1-PRERELEASE FreeBSD 7.1-PRERELEASE #0: Mon Nov 24 20:22:16 EST 2008 root@pcbsdx32-7:/usr/obj/pcbsd-build/cvs/7.0.2-src/sys/PCBSD i386

I am trying sysutils/batmon from ports.

Thanks!

[TerryP]

what is the output of


$ sysctl hw.acpi.battery.



The gkrellm2 system monitors also seem to be able to monitor battery usage via that system control; but I dunno how things work on a Sony....

[Ben Hacker Jr]

what is the output of


$ sysctl hw.acpi.battery.


user@pcbsd% sysctl hw.acpi.battery
hw.acpi.battery.life: 86
hw.acpi.battery.time: -1
hw.acpi.battery.state: 2
hw.acpi.battery.units: 1
hw.acpi.battery.info_expire: 5

For some reason I searched on the freebsd.org ports page but this time I only searched on "battery" instead of "battery monitor". I found many more options for battery monitoring.

I tried a few and settled on: wmbattery-1.21_2 for now. It was a 1 minute install via ports and has a -g option to allow placement on screen.

Thanks for taking a look at this post, and mentioning sysctl. I appreciate it!!

-Ben

[vermaden]

Check acpiconf -i 0 for primary battery stats and acpiconf -i 1 for secondary battery (if you have such).

[TerryP]

hw.acpi.battery.life: 86
hw.acpi.battery.time: -1


gives a decent overview of charge remaining for most casual uses, -1 meaning the laptop is plugged in rather then running on battery.

[Ben Hacker Jr]

Ok... this is really crazy.. I should have remembered this..

In PC-BSD7 (as in previous version) there is included a battery monitor.

Nothing needs to be installed.

1) Right click anywhere on the desktop (preferably not in desktop folder) and select "Unlock Widgets".

2) Right click on panel and select "Add Widgets"

3) There is a battery monitor there just waiting to be used... Double click it!

4) Right click anywhere on the desktop (preferably not in desktop folder) and select "Lock Widgets".

It's that simple. (in my case)

I am removing wmbattery-1.21_2 which did function well but I could not place it in the task bar like the built in appl.

-Ben